I have finally played my first Root game with friends, and while yeah, we have literally spent two hours on our first two turns, cause we kept passing each other the rulebook to try to figure out if we're playing right, after those initial turns - the game went very smooth. The faction board is extremely useful and helpful when you're just getting into the game, also personally I adore the physically of the many pieces. Marquise needing to physically move the wood pieces through the travel route was awesome, vagabond physically unearthening the ruins and opening the building slot up was great, I loved seeing how the birds' decree kept growing and growing under the board. And the Alliance is a weed you keep exterminating over and over with little success, cause they just keep appearing everywhere.
Anyway, the physicality of Root is one of my favourite things about it, and the design of the pieces, rulebooks and faction boards tries to be as helpful as it is even possible, which is highly appreciated.

Kyle Ferrin's art is phenomenal for boardgames

I'm surprised you guys consider the mouse icon a bummer. I've never come close to mixing it up, and would be furious if the array was 2 Heads, 1 Talon, and a Whole Entire Body.
I would find it way more discordant to keep the old design.

Love to see the issues I had were known, addressed, worked on, thought about, etc. One of the reasons I love Leder Games

I love boardgame talks!!

Awesome talk, really enjoyed it.
It's so amazing to see how people interpret things, especially to changes that the designer/dev assumes be 'small changes.'

One aspect I was wondering whilst listening to the presentation was "interpretation based on culture." Board Games are a western centric hobby, but now widely and increasingly reaching all corners of the world, would love to see how graphic industry evolves to this aspect.

Few years ago whilst teaching TerraMystica, one of the players found the "income" icon hard to grasp initially. TM's income icon is an open palm with the resource on it, which you gain during income phase. To him, in his country open palm is a sign of "begging," assuming that's how he gets income if he runs out of resources - and kept referring to it as that even when context was correct.
It wasn't game breaking and with time and explanation everyone easily gets it. But very interesting occurrence nonetheless.

This reminds me of the game Dice Forge which I think also could have used some more usability testing. It's sort of a deck-builder except you're physically swapping faces of a d6 die. It sets the gold standard for physical affordances with the way game components are shaped, showing how they go together. But it's an absolute disaster in terms of iconography, with all the cards, die faces, tokens, etc having no written words and instead a complex combination of icons to explain what it does to the point where it feels like learning a new language to understand what an ability does. Each ability is explained in the rulebook but the icons do a terrible job of explaining complex abilities and frequently contradict their own rules.

Interesting that he talks about failures when my group's experience has been that Root is genius for getting into because of the booklet that straight up takes you through 2 turns. Forcing you to play correctly.

Great talk... found many parts of this fascinating, thanks

Thanks for the well done presentation.  I learned a lot.  🙂

Great video. The first game is the most important one, like a first impression. Getting the rulebook and the components focused on the ease and usability in the first game is a big deal, and Leder does a good job in that regard. Root is popular, in part, for making something complex easy to learn and play, with a little bit of effort from the player.

thanks for the precious sharing

Fascinating!

Great tutorial! would suggest for the future to use the new Shortcuts API so users can remap hotkeys, and you can teach how to use that too. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you

19:40 Differences being a message is an interesting one. I've always inherently said something in a non-standard way when I meant there was a nuance to what I was saying and would get confused if someone said something in a non-standard way, but meant me to take it at face-value. Supposedly this exists in most every language. I think the most common example of this is in English is the double negative: "I'm not not going to pick you up from work."

this was so interesting

I just wish the digital game additional content was not locked behind DLC.

Wow foxes and mice’s getting along and one is not eating the other. So shocking.